Let's take a minute to really examine this "BA lets me fight low level monsters" idea that people keep bandying about. I'm not sure how far back the idea goes, but for a long time and certainly in 5e, everyone hits automatically on a 20. Doesn't matter what the AC was. So let's take the extreme example of a monster that hits you only on a 20 in a rapidly scaling math system. He hits you 1/20 times for let's say 1/5 of your total hit points (ultimately the numbers are irrelevant, because they can be scaled to suit). No we switch to a flat math system where that monster still hit's you, let's say 50% of the time but now he only does 1/50th of your total HP because we've shifted all the power scaling into HP. You can say it would be more than 1/50th of his HP, but then it's because you've slowed down power scaling not because you've slowed down AC scaling, I'm trying to keep the power scale even here.
Is there any reason why the flat math world is a more interesting fight than the steep math world? The challenge level is the same. Yes, the monsters almost never hit, but do you really give a crap if they hit your for 1/50th of your total HP? Do you really find it more exciting to have to knock off 2 HP 5 times a round than it is to actually have a bit of a worry that it will hurt if they roll well?
so level ten party, composed of 5 people, gets attacked by harpies.
it is an average sized encounter so that means just around 26 harpies so we will make it 26 harpies.
so the party can kill about 5-8 harpies a round. that means about 52 attacks the first round. Now each harpy can deal about 9 damage on average when it hits with both attacks and on average its going to hit about 50% of the time (these are complete ball parks if someone wants to actually hammer this out feel free) so first round 26 hits means about 234 incoming damage for the party (yet again if someone really feels the need to do any more than ball parking this feel free I'll admit my math for this is shakey at best). At level 10 that is enough to grease stain at least 1 party member. Now given all 52 attacks can't be made against the same guy we can assume that the first round won't be as much the problem, but going through the whole combat that pack of 26 harpies is indeed still a threat to your level 10 party. Harpies are a level 2 monster.
Seems like a correctly threatening and exciting piece of combat to me.
See, you're confusing AC scaling with power scaling. If you want high level beings to be less powerful relative to low level beings, that's fine. But that's no reason to put the scale in HP/damage instead of AC/attack. Supposing an alternative system where AC/attack went up every half level. In this alternative system the harpies would be hitting only 10% of the time instead of 50%, and their damage drops to about 47 (234/5). But because we don't need HP to increase nearly so rapidly to still have PCs be noticeably better as they level, we can have the PC's have only 1/5 as many HP too, and so the 47 damage is equally threatening and equally capable of greasing a party.
At the extremes this does break down. Because when you go from hitting 50% of the time to hitting 40% of the time, your DPR drops by 20%; but when you go from hitting 20% of the time to hitting 10% of the time, it drops in half. Power differentials thus increase geometrically (a slow geometry, but geometric) instead of linearly, so if you want to have a given differential between +/-1 beings you have to have a bigger one with +/-5 beings. But the acceleration is slow enough that it only breaks down at accuracies below about 30%. That means with even modest scaling like 1/2 level, you can fight monsters +/- 8 levels without it breaking down (assuming monsters have 50% at-level accuracy).
Let's compare that to Next. Is this harpy fight really exciting? I have to sit through 52 attack rolls in a single round? Plus roll probably 8-10 dice on each player's turn because their damage needs to scale so ridiculously fast? Each of those 52 attack rolls that hit is doing between 1/42 and 1/12 of my total HP? That's exciting to you? That seems like a total utter bore to me, a tedium of die roll after die role, each irrelevant on its own even if in the aggregate they have the potential to splat a character. Especially since, when it takes 37 of these rolls on average to kill you, the swing is really quite nearly zero so you know to a statistical certainty that 42 will kill you and 32 will not (I didn't run the numbers on that, but it's somewhere in that ballpark). At those extremes, I think flat math is breaking down too because you just need too many die rolls and too much book keeping to be fun. You'll need a few more harpies in the steeper scaling system to maintain the challenge, but each one will be much faster to run because you don't need to roll/calculate/record damage nearly so often. Frankly, both ways the encounter is more fun if you replace them harpy swarms, if you can just get over the fact that you need to stat out a new monster (which takes about 30 seconds if you're not making any fancy changes).
So how much are we really giving up for a little less ridiculousness in the "damage as accuracy" and the hp/damage bloat department? Seems to me like the answer is "nothing I would miss." Maybe even "nothing at all."
If there really are these vast swathes of people who absolutely loathe bounded accuracy (I can't speak to whether they exist, since my peer group ranges from "it's fine, I guess?" to "what's that?" in terms of opinions on BA), the time for them to speak - ideally through the playtest feedback mechanism - is now. The turnaround time on changes isn't zero, of course, and it's possible that what I'm sure is a deafening chorus of hatred for BA might already be something that they're working over in design. But the point of the lengthy public playtest is so that people can respond to things like BA.
Dwarves invented beer so they could toast to their axes. Dwarves invented axes to kill people and take their beer.
"Feel free to claim I said anything you like. How's someone going to call you out on it? Are they going to be all like, 'I know all of the things that Gary said, and that's not one of them?'" - Gary Gygax
..."window.parent.tinyMCE.get('post_content').onLoad.dispatch();" contenteditable="true" />If they were smart, they would make a different game with bounded accuracy - as a test case - and just leave D&D out of it. Then, they could see what kind of fanbase they could get with that, and go from there. But to risk the future success of D&D by forcing it into such a controversial and unnecessary new system? That's completely insane.
Bounded accuracy is pretty much just an attempt to reproduce a more AD&D feel to the game.
In AD&D, everything was pretty mcuh bounded. AC went from -10 to 10, ability scores stopped at 25, etc.
Personally I like the throwback to AD&D style, because I felt AD&D made for a better world. I hated how in 3E, if you ever wanted an encounter with a mind flayer elder brain, that the lesser mind flayers were total crap and bascally something the PCs would just ignore. 4E tried to fix that with the minion system, but the minion system had its own problems.
Looking back, it seemed that AD&D really did scale things the best.
the supporters simply cannot fathom how so many people could be so angry about it. They will have to accept that reality eventually.
Yes. If by "eventually" you mean "when the surveys and feedback indicate to WotC that a significant percentage of playtesters dislike it".
I always like seeing people say, "You guys have no idea how many people hate this." If that is the case, they can make themselves heard. If they aren't actually participating in the playtest, then they have only themselves to blame. It is like not voting and them complaining about the results of the election.
So, JacobSinger, get those hordes of people who hate BA and for whom the mere existence of BA in the game is enough to prevent them from playing to give feedback. If enough people don't like it, I assure you that the designers will change. We have seen it happen to many other things. Even something as fundamental as how trained skills work has changed.
..."window.parent.tinyMCE.get('post_content').onLoad.dispatch();" contenteditable="true" />If they were smart, they would make a different game with bounded accuracy - as a test case - and just leave D&D out of it. Then, they could see what kind of fanbase they could get with that, and go from there. But to risk the future success of D&D by forcing it into such a controversial and unnecessary new system? That's completely insane.
Bounded accuracy is pretty much just an attempt to reproduce a more AD&D feel to the game.
In AD&D, everything was pretty mcuh bounded. AC went from -10 to 10, ability scores stopped at 25, etc.
In AD&D a Fighter's THAC0 improved by 1 at every level. And as you point out AC had a variance of as much as 20 (and I'm pretty sure I remember some things in AD&D with AC below -10, but I can't back that claim up). Either way, AD&D's scaling was much closer to 3e than DDN. The major difference was attributes, which were made far more important in 3.5 and onward.
The difference in hit/AC over 20 levels in DDN is equivalent to about 5 levels in AD&D/3.5, even before accounting for magic items (which are supposed to be rarer in DDN)
Outside of this forum I have seen only a small minority of people who genuinely like BA
Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal. I've seen plenty of people who like it. But how many people have you seen? 20? 40? There are more than 80,000 playtesters. Neither your nor my experience comes close to a representative sample. Using our anecdotal experience would be terribly wrongminded.
it is not an insignificant enough chunk of the playerbase that we can just be brushed off and still come close to achieving the stated goal of uniting the fanbase.
You have no idea if that is true. You can keep saying it as if it is true, but it won't change the fact that neither you nor I know that to be the case. You'd certainly like it to be true, as it would confirm your preference, and I would like it to be false as that would confirm mine, but we don't actually know it to be true.
So because you don't know every person ever you will assume that me and others like me are in such an extreme minority that we can be easily brushed off?
I thought you were better than that. Guess that's what I get for thinking.
Weird. He didn't assume anything that was the point of HIS post. Maybe you read it too fast or something... He was saying that yours AND his sphere of people are too small to matter....
the supporters simply cannot fathom how so many people could be so angry about it. They will have to accept that reality eventually.
Yes. If by "eventually" you mean "when the surveys and feedback indicate to WotC that a significant percentage of playtesters dislike it".
I always like seeing people say, "You guys have no idea how many people hate this." If that is the case, they can make themselves heard. If they aren't actually participating in the playtest, then they have only themselves to blame. It is like not voting and them complaining about the results of the election.
And I said that we have been giving our feedback. You didn't quote that part.
Leadership and class choice should have NOTHING to do with each other, EVER.
Conflating the two is simply horrendous game design.
The treadmill effect: OP, you claim you never experienced it. I have no reason to believe you are lying, but I do have reason to believe we are not sharing the same words for the same experience.
As I understand and experienced the treadmill effect, it was that my To-Hit bonuses (as determined by level, ability, and level-appropriate gear (itself guided by wealth-by-level guidelines)) scaled at roughly the same rate as the defenses of the monsters deemed appropriate to my characters level. In short, the chance of me hitting and maybe defeating a kobold at low level was roughly the same as the chance of me hitting and maybe defeating an orc at slightly higher levels, and a demon at even higher levels, and so on and so forth.
Across all editions, whether it was explicit or hidden, the math of the game conspired, sometimes successfully and sometimes less so, to have a "even-leveled" challenges/encounters have a certain degree of difficulty, and challenges significanty above or below party level were subsequently harder or easier, respectively.
Is this not in your experience?
One of my long bugaboos about D&D was that after a given level, certain monsters were no longer useful, and thus couldn't take any meaningful role in some stories. A hypothetical story about a Dragons and their Kobold worshippers would be exceedingly difficult to tell long term. By the time the characters are high level, kobolds provide little to no appreciable threat, rendering their inclusion into the challenges I craft for my players inconsequential. Their defenses are so low that hitting and damaging them is all but assured, and their attack bonuses are so low compared against the PCs defenses that they are extremely unlikely to even hit a PC.
A single PC could wade into a swarming pile of kobolds and lay waste to all of them, with little regard to their personal safety. Sure, this gets across the idea of advancement and being more powerful, but it does so at the expense of any actual risk and drama. It is mere spectacle, nothing is at stake. Due to the rule that a Nat 20 is always a hit, the lowly kobolds have some small chance of damaging the player, but between the low percentage of success, the pitiable damage, and the PCs considerable HP pool and healing resources, it would take a unweildly large group of kobolds to provide any sort of credible challenge. I'm talking tens of kobolds, perhaps even hundreds of them (depending on which edition we are talking about).
The reverse is also true with high level monsters. To a dragon, a swarm of low-level warriors, mages, and commoners are no different than the aforementioned kobolds are to the high-level PC. The dragon simply has nothing to fear from anything significantly below their level, no matter their numbers. Their defense and attack values are simply too high to be threatened by anything less than an unweildly large, impossible-in-actual-practice group of low-level challengers.
In short, I cannot include high level creatures in the stories of low level PCs, and I cannot include low level creatures in the stories of high level PCs. They are simply running in different worlds. That has been the case for every edition, all the way up to 4e; though 4e did add some mechanics to address this "issue".
First, the open and very visible math made scaling a monster up or down any amount of levels (at the whim of the DM) made it very easy to have "high level kobolds" and "low level behirs", for example. Wanted your level 25 party to fight kobolds? Here's some level 25 kobolds.
The problem with this in practice was it only heightened the awareness of the treadmill effect I mentioned earlier. Those level 25 kobolds aren't any easier for your character to defeat at level 25 than the level 1 kobolds were when the PC just started out (well, to be fair, the level 25 kobolds lack some of the breadth of abilities that mid- and high-level monsters tended to have, but you get my point).
So 4e had the minion mechanic. Rather than throw a level 25 kobold at a level 25 PC and feel no advancement, or throw a level 1 kobold at a level 25 PC and feel no risk, you can throw a level 25 kobold minion at the level 25 PC. The PC is at risk of being hit and damaged a fair amount, and hitting the kobold is not guaranteed, but a single hit does drop the kobold minion in its tracks. It is a suitable mechanic for showing of growth as well as providing meaningful cannon fodder.
What this does entail, though, is a shift in perspective of what numbers and levels mean. Let's take a hypothetical kobold one meets at level 1. The PCs find him as challenging and threatening as he is supposed to be. The PCs invade his lair, he fights them, provides his challenge, and somehow lives and escapes to maybe potentially fight the PCs another day. Many levels later, the PCs encounter that very same kobold. As the DM, you could present him identically as you did at level 1, but due to the way the system math scales, he provides no credible threat. He cannot in any likelihood hit the PCs with any attacks, nor avoid any of theirs.
That may work for some, but again, let's remember that I'm looking for meaningful inclusion, meaningful threat, meaningful challenge. A level 1 kobold who has no appreciable chance of hitting or avoiding be hit doesn't provide that.
So instead of depicting that particular kobold as I did when the party was just starting out, I instead portray him as a higher level minion. Now he can provide some meaningful risk to the party, some small drain on their resources, while still showing how much more powerful the PCs are compared to him (by virtue of him dying in one hit).
So what does this have to do with Bounded Accuracy? BA allows me to skip the mechanical and narrative juggling of "re-casting" the low level kobold as a high level minion. Since a low level PC's attacks and defenses aren't vastly different from those of a high level PC, they can threaten and be threatened by a larger range of monsters across the spectrum of levels than in any other edition. Because damage and HP scale with level, low level monsters are low threat to high-level PCs, but never so low that the threat disappears almost entirely. And the reverse holds true with high level monsters facing low level PCs. The PCs are outclassed, but their success isn't impossible if they have a reasonable (and practical) numerical advantage.
At it's core, Bounded Accuracy is about making more of the game useful to play for a longer period of time. That, I feel, is a worthwhile goal.
Essentials zigged, when I wanted to continue zagging.
So because you don't know every person ever you will assume that me and others like me are in such an extreme minority that we can be easily brushed off?
Didn't you read what I wrote. I said because all weh have is anecdotal evidence, we can't assume one thing or another. I am not assuming you are an extreme minority. Nor am I assuming you ae. I am saying that anecdotal evidence is useless. We cannot conclude one way or the other and claiming that people who think like you are a significant number (or, alternately, claiming that people like you are an insiginificant number) is unfounded.
Guess that's what I get for thinking.
I wish you had read what I wrote, rahter than misconstrue it so you could be offended by something I did not say.
So we see a lot of the same behavioral patterns as we did with 4E: the supporters simply cannot fathom how so many people could be so angry about it. They will have to accept that reality eventually.
Okay, except I have twice already said -- in fact I said it in every respnse I've made to you in this thread -- that I can understand why you might not like the playtest. I've said it now three times. And all you've done is heap scorn and derision. So here I am saying I understand why you might not like it and then you go ahead and act like a jerk to me. So I really don't get what you're after, except perhaps a fight.
